For more information on alcohol use disorder, including treatment options, check out this piece by Rachel DuRose.
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For more information on alcohol use disorder, including treatment options, check out this piece by Rachel DuRose.
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The Boy and the Heron, the latest film from Studio Ghibli and its masterful director Hayao Miyazaki, was originally hailed as the 82-year-old artist’s final act of filmmaking. Given that a similar proclamation was made about 2013’s The Wind Rises, it doesn’t come as much of a shock to learn that reportedly, Miyazaki is already back at work on a new project. The Boy and the Heron is now in wide release in the US after a strong opening in Japan over the summer.
Titled How Do You Live? in Japan, borrowed from the 1937 Genzaburo Yoshino novel of the same name, the film’s opening scene takes place in 1943, the night 12-year-old Mahito’s mother Hisako dies in a hospital fire. It’s wartime, and the air-raid sirens and orange glow of the flames compound the feeling of helpless chaos as the boy sprints through the streets to try and reach her. One year later, he moves to the countryside to live with his father’s new wife — his mother’s younger sister, Natsuko, who is pregnant — and an assortment of elderly maids, a few of whom share facial characteristics with prior Ghibli characters that make them feel like old friends (or maybe enemies, in the case of one who bears a striking resemblance to Spirited Away’s Yubaba, a trope in Miyazaki’s work).
Mahito isn’t happy. He’s in mourning for his mother and navigating a new relationship with his aunt-slash-stepmother in an unfamiliar place; he’s variously set upon by his classmates and by an irritating yet compelling heron who keeps showing up nearby. The heron, who turns out to be a small and somewhat unpleasant man in a heron suit (go with it), convinces Mahito to search for his mother, whom the heron claims is alive, and the suddenly-missing Natsuko in a locked tower on the family’s property built by a formidable grand-uncle.
What happens next is in some ways classic Miyazaki and in some entirely refigured: the tower, of course, is filled with spirits and arcane magic, and Mahito must figure out how to make his way through and locate the people he loves. His enemies include an army of gigantic parakeets who by their very presence make the heron seem a whole lot more appealing. As for pals, Spirited Away’s soot sprites have some stiff competition in the “tons of adorable little guys” department, in the form of the warawara, or bubble spirits. Mahito ultimately must decide whether he wants to remain in this alternate world or return to his own, with all its attendant flaws and disappointments; no real spoilers, but I have to imagine you can guess which path he chooses.
Nearly all of Miyazaki’s films confront mortality in some form or another. Even My Neighbor Totoro, which you’d be forgiven for remembering as if it were a mostly pleasant dream, centers around the hospitalization of the two main characters’ mother, and the family’s uncertainty over her fate colors their every interaction. This existential ballast is a Studio Ghibli hallmark as surely as the sprawling fantasy worlds and brightly animated characters. The Boy and the Heron, in turn, asks what happens in the aftermath of great loss: how to make sense of the world’s cold logic and baffling illogic, and how to find joy and personal achievement even while bearing the weight of it all.
It’s a bit glib to say that you could make a case for “How Do You Live?” as a viable title for virtually all of Miyazaki’s films; it might be more accurate to say that asking that question with such subtle persistence helps make him such a brilliant filmmaker in the first place. He has clear reverence for smallness, and is keenly interested in the tiny kindnesses and cruelties we extend to one another. The sumptuous depictions of food, the exuberant gestures of characters like the maids and the heron himself; these aren’t just aesthetic flourishes for their own sake, they’re an argument for the vital importance of the everyday. Here, now, Miyazaki seems to say, is your life.
So: how do you live? To the degree that The Boy and the Heron provides an answer, it’s through a constant series of choices adding up to something meaningful. You don’t always have to understand what’s happening, or why, but you stumble forward just the same, trying to be good and righteous and sure that there will be a tomorrow even when things feel hopeless. You try to see beyond yourself, and in doing so, figure out who you want to be. If you don’t personally happen to be a Ghibli protagonist, chances are that your own journey of self-discovery will involve fewer talking birds, but the lessons, hard-won and even unsatisfying as they may be, bear repeating just the same. Whether this is Hayao Miyazaki’s final film or not (my money’s on two more, which might be wishful thinking), The Boy and the Heron is a powerful, worthy, and perfectly scaled entry from one of the greatest to ever do it.
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We’re in a cultural moment where it feels like so much is being rehashed, repackaged, and resold to a captive audience. This is certainly the case in entertainment, where the Hollywood reboot machine is the driving force behind what makes it to our screens; even “original” programming is frequently built from familiar storytelling tropes and formats. The same kind of recycling — sorry, remixing — holds true in pop music.
This carries over into matters of business and politics with just as much resonance. And when it comes to lifestyle topics like dieting, parenting, and even sex, we wind up circling the drain and repackaging old trends and ideas as hot new fads, too.
What makes newness, or novelty, or originality, so important in the first place, particularly in a society that heavily prioritizes individual comfort and choices? Are we in a uniquely not-new moment, or has it actually always felt this way?
Could we ever really tell a new story about a very old mermaid?
By Alissa Wilkinson
How today’s fight over pornography is rooted in a 40-year-old feminist schism.
By Constance Grady
The endless cycling — and recycling — of parenting advice.
By Anna North
When you democratize finance, you get the good and the bad.
By Emily Stewart
Self-improvement is old. What’s new is the bootstrapping mythos and toxic positivity of the very rich.
By Whizy Kim
CREDITS
Editors: Meredith Haggerty, Alanna Okun, Lavanya Ramanathan, Julia Rubin
Copy editors/fact-checkers: Elizabeth Crane, Kim Eggleston, Tanya Pai, Caitlin PenzeyMoog
Additional fact-checking: Anouck Dussaud, Matt Giles
Art direction: Dion Lee, Paige Vickers
Audience: Gabriela Fernandez, Shira Tarlo, Agnes Mazur
Production/project editors: Lauren Katz, Nathan Hall
It’s hard to overstate the importance of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The game, which launched in 2017 alongside the Nintendo Switch, was an instant hit, selling 29 million copies to date and earning glowing praise from critics and players. It was singular in the staggering beauty of its game world, the deceptive simplicity of its plot structure, and the sheer fun and creativity of its mechanics.
In the years since, its popularity has only grown, as has anticipation for its sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, which was at last released on May 12. There is ample evidence to suggest that Tears of the Kingdom will be the biggest deal in gaming this year.
This is largely due to the fact that Breath of the Wild (or BotW, as it’s affectionately styled and which my autocorrect now recognizes more readily than the common acronym “BTW”) introduced a whole swath of people to modern video games. An extremely unscientific sampling of my friends, acquaintances, and online strangers has revealed it to be by far the most frequently occurring gateway game, both for folks who had barely touched a controller in their lives and those returning to gaming after sometimes decades; more than one person I know bought a Switch solely to play BotW. A commonly echoed sentiment is how remarkable the game is when you’re playing for the first time; because it’s so focused on discovery and exploration, even the most seemingly mundane places become potential troves. If there were one game for which I could get a cosmetic lobotomy and experience completely afresh, Breath of the Wild would without hesitation be my pick. Getting to play Tears of the Kingdom now, six years later, feels like the closest we can reasonably get.
Breath of the Wild had a sizeable impact on the gaming industry. You’d be hard-pressed to look at a lineup of games from a major publisher in the last half-decade and not see its influence everywhere (and Tears of the Kingdom’s six-year development cycle — reasonable given the sheer scope of the game — left plenty of room for imitators). It catalyzed the open-world genre, wherein players can go wherever they want and complete tasks in any order. It has such a pronounced aesthetic, with its lush fields and imperious mountains and wide skies, that it’s been ripped off to the point of near-parody. There have been subtler lessons, too, evident in other games’ battle mechanics, minimalist music, and environmental puzzles.
All of those factors certainly helped make BotW special, but they’re not the whole story. Nor are they the whole story of Tears of the Kingdom (styled as TotK, which I have indelibly and unfortunately been pronouncing in my head as “TikTok”), a game that honors its predecessor — the same visual style, the same combat system, the same little jingle whenever you successfully cook a dish — while building on it in countless ways. Reportedly, the game is twice the size of BoTW. You can take to the skies and go deep underground in addition to roaming the land of Hyrule, and returning to locations from the previous installment yields a plethora of new discoveries.
What makes both of these games work is simple: They are games that respect you as the player and the very concept of games in the first place.
(A note on spoilers here: yes for Breath of the Wild, no for Tears of the Kingdom, beyond a couple of mechanics and plot points already highlighted in gameplay trailers.)
The Legend of Zelda has a long, not totally coherent, history. The games — there have been 19 major titles released since the debut of the series’ titular game in Japan in 1986 — take place along a scattered and splintering timeline, with some plot points reverberating throughout installments and others standalone. What every Zelda game has in common is the series protagonist, Link, a mostly silent, blond, elf-boy warrior. Sometimes he is a child, other times an adult. Sometimes he’s accompanied on his journey; more often he’s alone. He’s usually trying to help the Princess Zelda in some way, although she also tends to help right back, and generally their aim is protecting Hyrule from the evil Ganon. Those are the rough mythological contours, but the story is told anew each time.
Breath of the Wild occurs in the aftermath of great destruction. Ganon has already won; Hyrule has already fallen; Zelda is sealed away, and all you, Link, have left from her are memory fragments dispersed across the bludgeoned continent. Despite the unequivocally dour sitch, though, the atmosphere is lively and bursting with secrets, rewarding you no matter where you might want to explore. It’s easy to forget at times that you’re meant to be saving the world, when the world is so ripe in its own right. This is what has compelled so many people to play the game for hundreds, or even thousands, of hours: the sense of freedom it offers, the singular joy that comes from making a choice and having it pay off, the immersion in a place that’s by equal measures gentle and terrifying.
TotK, picking up the story a handful of years later, offers that same feeling, allowing you to explore the sky and the subterranean world with the same attention to detail of the previous game, only on an even grander scale. The first time I, as Link, swan-dove from the sky down to earth, I burst into tears; even hang-gliding from the highest mountains of BotW doesn’t achieve the level of loftiness that Tears of the Kingdom delivers. You feel small in that moment, but part of something much larger; it almost feels like glimpsing the sacred.
It’s not just the breadth and depth of the world that’s so appealing in these games, but how you can manipulate and navigate it. In BotW, players had the power of runes — like a large magnet you can summon at will, and endlessly replenishing bombs — to draw on in order to solve puzzles, fight enemies, and generally just mess around. They’re gone in TotK, which instead offers this same approach in the form of a magical arm Link acquires when his own is injured; it bestows abilities that are for the most part extremely clever. One such skill is the ability to reverse the path of an object through time (turning a raft over a waterfall, say, into an aquatic elevator); another is the ability to fuse items together; still another allows you to ascend through a ceiling above you, and features one of the more satisfying sound effects I’ve encountered in the game so far.
These build and expand on the rune powers by virtue of how endlessly customizable the combinations are, which is a boon for player creativity and gameplay flexibility. I’ve managed to build bridges, boats, mine carts, and a whole bunch of ill-fated hybridized weapons (weapon durability, a contentious aspect of the first game, is here to stay, which you honestly have to respect); I’ve also cooked a vast array of dishes because modern Zelda games are first and foremost really beautiful cooking simulators. While there are many small-to-medium quality-of-life improvements, the fact that there are now actual in-game recipe cards is one of my personal favorites, although it has been a little bittersweet not requiring an actual physical notebook to keep track this time around.
These games, while stunning, are not perfect; I didn’t love BotW the first time I sat down to play back in 2017, when I was too frustrated by the pace of the game’s first few tutorial hours and found myself clumsy with the controls. It wasn’t until the spring of 2020 (for no reason!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) that I picked it up again, got over the hump of the mechanics and my own fear of being bad at things, and realized that above all Hyrule was a place I could go at a time when I could go very few places.
TotK, too, takes some getting used to in its first section, particularly in the case of the fiddlier arm abilities; I spent probably a solid 30 minutes at the onset shaking apart items I’d accidentally fused together weirdly. I don’t imagine it’s a dealbreaker even for new players (although I would strongly suggest playing Breath of the Wild first because, like, it’s there), but it does take some force of will to figure out the controls and the rules of engagement before you can really get to the good stuff.
What even these flaws belie, though, is the degree to which both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are invested in teaching you how to play them. I think most good games are, to some extent. That’s the real magic of these games, to me: the way they allow you as the player to set your own pace and your own terms while still weighing each choice you make with appropriate gravity. They hand you the tools, and then graciously step aside to let you wield them.
This is why the way Breath of the Wild ends is quietly jarring. Not because of what happens, but because of what doesn’t. Once you’ve finally built up the strength to confront Ganon in his castle, once you’ve whittled down his health and braved a (IMO kind of anticlimactic) final battle, the game just … ends. You don’t get to experience Hyrule post-blight; there’s no returning to this lush kingdom you’ve saved at last. You can start up a new game file, of course, but it’s not the same. This is intentional, and thematically resonant; Link has rarely, in his 37-year history, gotten to enjoy the spoils of his labor, perhaps because he’s needed elsewhere along the snaking Zelda timeline as soon as he’s dusted off his hands.
It helps explain all the breathless waiting for Tears of the Kingdom, and the relieved exhale when it turned out to be just as breathtaking as its predecessor. You don’t return to precisely the same Hyrule — if the series teaches you anything, it’s that you never really can — but where you do find yourself is both familiar and even richer and more expansive. What you do from there is up to you.
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My once-peaceful home has been torn asunder, and it’s all Elden Ring’s fault.
Elden Ring is a video game, and an extremely popular one — the NPD Group, which tracks monthly game sales, issued a report noting that it’s the bestselling game of the year so far, selling over 12 million copies in the month it has been available and already in serious contention as one of the best games of the year, if not recent memory.
It is also extremely popular with my partner and me, who share a television and a PlayStation and are therefore unable to both play at the same time. So far, I would say that is the game’s greatest flaw, and it is hardly its fault.
Because Elden Ring is good. Like, cancel-your-plans, ignore-your-chores, glance-up-and-realize-it’s-three-in-the-morning good. It’s good in the kind of way you want to evangelize to practically everyone, which marks it as something of a departure from its immediate predecessors. A mostly solo role-playing game made by the studio FromSoftware (colloquially called FromSoft) under the direction of auteur Hidetaka Miyazaki, it’s the successor to games like the Dark Souls series, Bloodborne, and Sekiro, all of which are legendary for their difficulty, their precision, and their intricately layered, often hard-to-parse lore. They’re beloved for good reason (Bloodborne might be my partner’s all-time favorite game), but certainly not for everyone. I play a ton of video games and yet I’d always been intimidated by these, assuming they were too dark and frustrating for my more lackadaisical, button-mashing play style.
Elden Ring takes the fundamental DNA of those games — the sensitive mechanics, the creepy yet compelling aesthetic, and, yes, the difficulty — and suffuses it throughout a third-person open-world setting (in layman’s terms, that means you’re a little guy running around fighting enemies). As the main character, an individual known as a “Tarnished,” you roam an ever-unfolding map to seek out enemies and questlines and eventually, hopefully, become the Elden Lord. (More on the plot, such as it is, later.)
The world is stunning and bizarre in its vastness, and provides the player with what I consider the game’s crucial element: It gives you a seemingly infinite number of places to go and things to do when you don’t feel like slamming your head against the wall confronting a difficult enemy.
It’s still wildly tough — I died around two dozen times in my first hour of the game, and a further couple dozen while attempting to take on a fight that I later learned wasn’t even against a major boss, just, like, some dude — but the game provides you with a heady sense of exploration and wonder, and a multitude of tools to improve your character build until you’re ready to go back and try again. And when you do, and you win, and Margit the Fell Omen (literally all of the names sound like this) is a pile of dust at your feet, holy fucking hell does it feel good.
Still, this game is enormous and complicated, and I’d argue that there’s still a significant barrier to entry. That shouldn’t dissuade you if you’re interested in checking it out or just learning more, but it’s good to go in armed with some basics if you’re new to the franchise like I am. Here are answers to questions you might have, as spoiler-free as is possible in a game where basically every new thing you discover could be regarded as a spoiler, but also where there isn’t really a traditional “story” to speak of. Arise now, ye Tarnished!
“Plot” is sort of a strong word when it comes to FromSoft games. There’s certainly a critical path here — you’re seeking out big bads in order to kill them and collect pieces of, you guessed it, a really old ring — but you could spend dozens if not hundreds of hours playing without any real sense of what’s going on or why things happen, and still have a satisfying experience with this game. Information is parceled out in often easy-to-miss dribs and drabs; you primarily learn tidbits about the world by reading item descriptions, or by talking multiple times to the same NPC (gamer speak for “non-playable character,” like a merchant), and even then it doesn’t necessarily add up to a single neat whole. The world you inhabit has suffered tremendously, has fractured beyond memory, and that sense is prevalent as you are dropped in without foresight or plan and begin to collect breadcrumbs.
I thought I’d be frustrated by the lack of direction or narrative propulsion, but haven’t found that to be the case at all; in fact, it’s liberating to feel like there’s nothing I’m really “supposed” to be doing and therefore can spend my time riding my ghost-horse halfway across the map to a location that just looks kind of cool. And when something does snap into place — when an NPC shows up in a location you never expected, or you realize why it was so important you picked up that seemingly useless item 10 hours back — it bears a strong resemblance to the satisfaction you feel after winning a hard battle. Above all, the game is generous; it rewards puttering around unearthing whatever seems interesting to you.
If you’re looking for more concrete-ish backstory to the FromSoft games, there are countless streamers and YouTubers recording their playthroughs, tips, and interpretations of lore, and quite honestly part of the fun of the game right now is seeing all of that sweet, sweet content get created. As a starting point, VaatiVidya is a popular YouTuber who explains everything from the series’ more missable plot points to how to find important items early on, and my friends over at Into the Aether (a lowkey video game podcast) have been streaming their runs on Twitch.
Really quite long, unless you’re a speedrunner who’s managed to complete it in under 30 minutes, which, go with God. The average playtime on Steam thus far is around 48 hours, but anecdotally I’d say that the overall game runs longer if you’re exploring and poking around (and getting absolutely stomped by gigantic evil bears); most people I know who have already rolled credits have put in at least 60 hours, and many folks have reported putting in well over 100. Considering the game came out less than a month ago, that’s a lot.
Difficulty is arguably the hallmark of FromSoft games, but it’s not meant to be frustrating for the sake of frustration; rather, it serves a narrative function, and provides the rhythm underpinning the entire game. You’re supposed to try again and again to overcome a challenge; you’re supposed to learn an enemy’s unique cadences and timing and battle techniques in order to gain just an inch more of an edge from attempt to attempt.
“If death is to be more than a mark of failure, how do I give it meaning? How do I make death enjoyable?” Miyazaki told the New Yorker upon the game’s release. In the same interview, he said, “I just want as many players as possible to experience the joy that comes from overcoming hardship.”
This is obviously not everyone’s cup of tea, nor should it be. If it sounds like the opposite of how you’d like to spend your leisure hours, that’s deeply reasonable. But I will say that as someone who has often been attracted to gentler games, where sometimes there isn’t even a hint of a reanimated skeletal warlock who can one-shot you from an in-game mile away, I’ve found it far more accessible than I’d anticipated, and frustration isn’t even in the top five of my emotions most of the time I’m playing.
I want to be clear here that I’m not very good, at this game or really even these types of games; I tend to prefer turn-based over real-time combat, which basically means that I like to agonize over making a move for a plethora of seconds that is absolutely not available in a game this fast-paced. But I can figure it out; I can use the tools at my disposal, memorize the movements of enemies, and hack and cast my way through most hardships eventually. If I can, you probably can too.
He sure is. According to the New Yorker, Martin and Miyazaki were mutual fans of one another’s work, and the Game of Thrones author “provided snatches of text about [the world]’s setting, its characters, and its mythology” rather than writing the actual script of the game. See if you can spot the somewhat unexpected place where his initials show up.
Nope. If you have one of the older consoles, like a PS4 or an Xbox One, it runs there, as well as the newer PS5 and Xbox Series X and S (it is not and likely never will be on Nintendo platforms like the Switch). It’s also on PC, and if you are one of the lucky few people who have managed to snag Valve’s new SteamDeck, which is essentially a handheld PC, it apparently runs pretty well there too. Just know that it is a massive, massive game, and as such there have been a variety of bugs reported, particularly among PC users.
You bet there is. The question of difficulty is sort of perennially central, among other somewhat related topics like user interface — there’s a corner of the hardcore FromSoft fandom that apparently believes the only way to “properly” play Elden Ring is by ignoring any element that might make battle easier (long-range magic, summoning ghostly creatures to provide backup, playing online co-op with other players to take down bosses), in a way that can veer into snobbery and dismissiveness when it comes to less-seasoned players. There’s a sort of meme-mantra in the community known as “git gud,” which, as Jade King writes over at the Gamer, is “shorthand for hardcore players laughing in the faces of newcomers who found themselves struggling with tough enemies and obtuse systems when learning the ropes of FromSoftware’s masterful vision.”
If you spend time on Twitter and Reddit reading about or discussing the game (which is, IMO, one of the more enjoyable parts of playing it at the same time as so many other people), you’re bound to encounter this attitude, although at this point you’re probably more likely to see its vocal opposite, decrying the above as elitist gatekeeping.
I tend to fall closer to that end of the spectrum: All those in-game elements are there for a reason, after all, and essentially serve as difficulty modulators (although the recent patch update might have defanged some previously overpowered items and skills). Above all, though, anyone who disagrees with your play style did not pay $59.99 in order to have access to your personal game file, so truly who cares what they think.
The Resties, a sub-brand of gaming podcast The Besties, is co-hosted by Polygon’s Russ Frushtick and Chris Plante, and one of their recent episodes has an excellent list of tips for beginners, many of which I found naturally over the course of my own gameplay.
They recommend choosing a starting class that has some facility with magic if you’re new — I wound up going with the Astrologer, a mostly magic-and-occasional-melee unit that can project bolts of power from far away, which means I don’t have to go directly toe-to-toe with many of the stronger enemies. I’d add that it’s totally fine and even fun to start the game over a couple of times if you want to experiment with different characters; I’d originally chosen the Ranger, a class that focuses on bows, and while I wound up bouncing off in the first couple of hours because it was just too hard for me to do any real damage, I’m really glad I got a feel for such a dissimilar unit. I’m already planning to do future runs with a variety of builds. (See, this is how you get to 100 hours without blinking).
Another piece of advice they offer, and I heartily cosign, is to get comfortable just straight-up running away from situations you find you can’t handle. You get a horse early on (his name is Torrent, which some players speculate is so if you Google “Elden Ring torrent” you’ll get a bunch of pictures of the horse) and he can go faster than virtually any enemy I’ve encountered; it might feel cowardly or unnatural at first, but there’s a certain glee and even humor in the moment when you realize you’re absolutely in over your head and need to frickin’ book it.
That’s probably my last and best piece of advice: Let yourself find the humor in Elden Ring. It’s a serious game, to be sure, full of darkness and terror and unanswerable questions about the nature of life and death and legacy, but it’s also fairly hilarious. I don’t often laugh out loud at games, yet there have been more than a few moments when I’ve been absolutely ganked by an enemy in such an unceremonious way that I can’t help but burst into giggles. The writing, though spare, is often dry and arcane to the point of self-aware absurdity, and the character and level design is capable of evoking simultaneous paroxysms of terror and a hefty dose of WTF.
Really, my overall hesitation before playing this game was fear: fear of the dark and of vastness and of monsters with heads grafted onto their elbows, sure, but mostly fear that I would suck, and that it would not be at all fun to suck. I’m here to report that I do, and that it absolutely, totally is. Now the greatest challenge is snagging the PlayStation controller before my partner gets to it first.
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It would be hard to overstate the degree to which I’ve become addicted to video games during the pandemic. I’d played them steadily since I was a kid, occasionally becoming obsessed with this franchise or that throughout my 20s, but it wasn’t until I had nowhere to go, nothing to do, and nobody to do it with that this lightly pulsating rhythm beneath my day-to-day existence became a full-blown roar.
I’ve mostly found it comforting to play gigantic games — JRPGs (Japanese role-playing games) that can take hundreds of hours to complete — or open-world adventures where you can wander a fictional countryside and venture beyond the walls of your one-bedroom apartment for an hour or five.
Recently, though, thanks to a full-throated recommendation from my favorite video game podcast, I completely fell in love with a game that is the definition of small: barely 10 hours long, made by a team of only a handful of developers, and originally conceived as an add-on to a much, much larger game.
It’s called The Forgotten City, and if any of the following cultural products strongly appeal to you then you should stop reading this and just go play it without any additional context: The Legend of Zelda (Majora’s Mask, specifically), Lost, the immersive theatrical event Sleep No More, the sort of vague pre-teen conception of “mythology,” or gossip.
Here is about as spoiler-free a description of the game as I can manage: You as a modern-day protagonist find yourself thrown back in time to an almost-abandoned, seemingly ancient-Rome-adjacent city. In the process of figuring out how you got there and how to return to your own time, you get to explore the environs and talk to each of the few dozen residents you encounter, all of whom clearly have A Lot Going On. Almost right away, you learn that everyone in the city, including yourself, is bound by a single rule: If even one person commits a sin, everyone dies.
The game cleverly answers basically every question you might have right now, such as, “Wait, how do you define a sin?” and, “That seems like a raw deal, why don’t they all simply move?” Without giving too much else away, the gameplay functions as a loop, wherein you are able to replay the same day over and over again, attempting to unravel the various mysteries that stack up as you interview the city’s residents. It results in something like a Rube Goldberg machine of problems to solve and decisions to make; helping one person with one issue can reverberate across half a dozen seemingly unrelated plot points. Still, it never feels frustrating or repetitive, even when you make a mistake — it’s extremely possible to find yourself in the position of the sinner who ruins everything, but the game always gives you plenty of room to learn and do better next time.
The gameplay mechanic is tidy and legible, with an in-game checklist of tasks to accomplish — the ideal example of a to-do list you can play. It feels endlessly satisfying to reach these tiny milestones and to feel the tug of purpose alongside the sheer joy of exploring a beautifully rendered landscape and talking to extremely well-written characters. Mostly, though, it’s just fun, whether you’re solving puzzles, spreading rumors, or helping a kindly himbo run for political office. There’s a sense of urgency without stress, of propulsion at a manageable pace, and even moments that could be scary or unsettling or mechanically difficult can be approached from so many angles that it should feel accessible to folks who have never touched a video game before. (There’s a combat element, for example, that you can opt out of entirely without disrupting the game’s narrative, a feat of clever plot construction as much as it is just good sense.)
This is especially interesting given the game’s development history. It was originally conceived as a modification of Skyrim, the massive open-world game, back in 2016, and became a cult hit before a team of indie developers turned it into a standalone. I’ve honestly never been into Skyrim, finding it too big and overwhelming even for my often outsized sensibilities, but The Forgotten City is compelling enough that I sort of want to dust off my copy and experience the mod in its first iteration. Something else I’ve gotten into in quarantine is fanfiction (I think, at 31, that I’m probably the oldest first-time fic reader alive) and the question of how you take someone else’s characters and build worlds and turn them into something fresh is endlessly fascinating to me. The familiarity is comforting; the new context is exciting.
So, too, is replaying. I replay games that don’t have built-in time loop mechanics all the time (I’ve played Persona 5 Royal, a game that takes over 100 hours to complete, twice during lockdown already). The Forgotten City is designed to be revisited and re-experienced until you’ve encountered every possible ending. It provides a framework for going back that never feels stale or hopeless. In a time when those sensations are in abundance, when every IRL day feels the same, there’s a powerful fantasy in getting to live the same virtual day over and over on your own terms until you finally get it right.
The Forgotten City is available on Steam and major consoles. For more recommendations from the world of culture, check out the One Good Thing archives.
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Part of the Recovery Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.
Aude White is a graphic artist based in Brooklyn whose work has appeared in the New York Times, New York magazine, Outside, NewYorker.com, and more. When she’s not drawing, she’s director of communications at Vox Media.
Alanna Okun is deputy editor at The Goods as well as the author of The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater: Essays on Crafting and Knit a Hat: A Beginner’s Guide to Knitting. She lives in Brooklyn and frequently collaborates with Aude.
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The plan was always that my boyfriend and I were going to move in together. We’ve been dating for four years. I’ve lived alone in a lovely little studio for the past seven; he got his own one-bedroom last August, with the intention that once my lease was up this coming April, I’d pack my bags and join him there full-time.
That plan was accelerated by two things: the coronavirus pandemic, and Persona 5 Royal.
You have probably heard of the pandemic. It’s not great! What you are somewhat less likely to know about, if you are not into video games, is P5R. It’s an intricate game with a plot so bizarre and lightly horny as to be almost impossible to explain to a casual listener. (It’s enough to know that you are a mysterious high schooler who can infiltrate people’s mind palaces, and you have a talking cat.)
I know about its inscrutability because I have played more than 100 hours of the game in the past month and have managed to sufficiently explain it to exactly zero of my loved ones. My boyfriend left town for a week in late September — our first real time apart since the stay-at-home orders came down in March — and I stayed at his/soon-to-be-our apartment to take care of our cat, Tuesday. Faced with a long week of few things to do and fewer people to talk to (Tuesday, for all that she is an exemplary pet, isn’t much in the way of conversation), I decided to download this game I’d vaguely heard about on his PlayStation 4.
I’ve been playing video games since I was a child; I bought my Switch the week it was released and have a PS4 of my own, in addition to a collection of handheld consoles. I tend to get obsessed with two or three games a year, sinking dozens of hours into one over a short period and then abandoning it for other pursuits: traveling, seeing friends, knitting, reading.
Now, of course, those social activities aren’t available to me, and even the quiet indoor ones aren’t easy for me to mentally access. The way I consume games has become ravenous, all-encompassing, a welcome escape in a moment that offers very few.
As such, by the time my boyfriend returned from his trip, I was hooked on Persona. It became clear I would no longer be spending much time in any apartment (for example: mine) that did not contain access to the game save file on his console. I arranged to give up the lease on my place a few weeks later.
One hundred hours is hardly the most time I’ve spent on a video game this year, particularly since the pandemic descended. I’ve spent around the same amount on Hades, in which you play as the son of the titular character, intent on escaping the underworld. I gave over slightly more time (around 150 hours) to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, exploring a pastoral yet post-apocalyptic world and trying to redeem it. It’s nowhere near the 350-plus hours I sank into decorating my island in Animal Crossing, nor does it come close to the 400 and change I devoted to Fire Emblem: Three Houses, yet another intricate, bizarre, and lightly horny strategy game whose plot is absolutely futile to explain.
All told, including the swaths of time when I fiddled around with smaller, shorter games, I spent about 1,200 hours this way over the course of 2020. (Somewhat more than Jeremy Gordon’s 800-plus hours last year, which he wrote about for The Outline and which I can only imagine has ballooned in the intervening 12 months.) This is the equivalent of 50 days. It is, abstractly, embarrassing, given that video games are even now often dismissed out of hand as a waste of time, the purview of Mountain Dew-swilling teenagers crouching in crusty basements. It’s especially so if you regard this as a period where you should really be writing King Lear or whatever.
I am not one of those people and don’t actually know anyone who is using this time this way, but I do still have flashes of …. what? Not quite guilt, certainly not shame, but maybe the sense that if I were a two or three dial turns better version of myself, I’d at least want to devote my time elsewhere right now. I’ve been knitting since before I could read and up until now loved both activities unreservedly; this year, I found it hard to eke out the sleeves of a single sweater, and have watched as my digital library holds evaporate one by one into the ether as if they had nothing to do with me. Writing for any purpose besides my job is out of the question, and once the choir practices I attended weekly for eight years shifted to Zoom, I made it to two or three rehearsals before dropping off entirely.
I am, obviously, describing depression, for which I am medicated and therapized and with which I have it far easier than probably the bulk of the world’s population right now. Still, it’s been alarming to look at my own stats — my pile of unknit yarn, my stack of unread books — and see the uniform and precipitous drop-offs.
Video games give me a road map, a set of guidelines, a series of tasks I know I can complete even when the dishes in the real-life sink are stacked precariously high. Katie Heaney wrote an excellent piece about this very phenomenon for The Cut, called, aptly, “Video Games Are a To-Do List You Play.” She spoke with a lecturer on computer science at the University of Glasgow, Matthew Barr, writing, “Because these tasks are low stakes (i.e., imaginary), they provide a hit of accomplishment without the same level of anxiety or stress that real-life tasks can induce. ‘The stakes are lowered, but it still taps into that part of the brain where it feels like you’re getting stuff done,’ explains Barr. ‘You feel like you’re in control.’”
I am someone who has always loved structure. I plot every aspect of my day, from work meetings to catch-up chats with friends, on my Google Calendar. I do it, I think, because of what I sometimes privately call the vending machine principle: the idea that if you do X thing, if you put in Y amount of time and effort, you will achieve Z results, in some cosmically fair and even-handed way. It’s so patently not how the world, with its inequities and randomness and hard edges, actually works. This desire, this organizing principle, is far more embarrassing than my months spent playing video games, and I think that is partly why I turn to them in times when I feel irrevocably unmoored from cause and effect.
I am not the only person to devote myself to video games in the pandemic, or before it — more than 164 million Americans played one in 2018, according to a 2019 report by the Entertainment Software Association, and total US sales exceeded $43.4 billion. That rolls together phone, computer, and console games, and encompasses casual and serious gamers alike across gender and demographic lines. Data isn’t fully available yet for the current moment, but the uptick in new gamers since March has been, at least anecdotally, marked. As a newish gamer told Luke Winkie in a piece for Polygon, “Gaming feels like a much more satisfying use of time than it used to.”
Because what even is time right now? How are we even supposed to be using it? Each hour, day, week, and month passes in horrible dollops, somehow both too quickly to get much of anything done and too slowly to ever arrive at a sense of completion. The games I’ve turned to this year, by contrast, all regard time differently: In Hades, for example, you are quite literally trapped in an eternal cycle, equal parts urgent and carefree, with no sense of when a day ends or begins. Animal Crossing operates in real time, on a real seasonal calendar, with particular actions and gameplay available depending on when you log on.
Persona 5 Royal regards time in a way that’s not so far from our current reality, in which every day feels somehow too short to get everything done. The game operates on a monthly calendar; because you are a high schooler and a metaphysical vigilante, you still mostly have to go to school on weekdays, and the game allows you to decide how to spend your time after school and during days off. You can choose friends and acquaintances with whom to deepen your bonds, and which activities to undertake. It is seemingly impossible, without the help of a wildly in-depth strategy guide, to optimize all these relationships in the time allotted, and so each “day” (which can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours to complete in real time) is an exercise in choice, in what to prioritize and what to neglect.
You might think this would cut far too close to the bone, but there’s something cathartic about getting to playact one of the aspects of my life that is giving me so much existential trouble. It is almost akin to exposure therapy. It allows me to experience time in ways that I’m unable to in this current morass, as something stable and legible. At its best, this sort of gameplay oils up the parts of my brain that are currently so rusted over, making it that much easier to complete my IRL chores or text back a friend in a timely manner instead of stewing in the not-doing-ness of it all. At its (or, rather, my) worst, I can always turn off the PlayStation.
Important as Persona and its ilk are to me, I am, of course, being a little facetious about the whole video-games-are-the-reason-I’m-moving-in-with-my-boyfriend thing. I wanted to for a very long time even before the pandemic. After its onset, the days and nights I spent working and sleeping in my solo apartment — time that used to be so precious to me, to the point where it was one of the main reasons we held off on cohabitation — hardened into something tinged with dread, mingling with my garden-variety depression and my fear about the future in a way that quickly became unsustainable. I stayed up many nights until 3 or 4, playing Fire Emblem or Animal Crossing until it felt sickly, like when you look down and realize you’ve eaten an entire box of Oreos despite not really tasting them beyond the first bite.
Now, we have our little life. We keep a light schedule, coordinating Zoom calls and litterbox scooping and who gets to use the PlayStation when. Sometimes my boyfriend takes over the TV for hours, playing a battle royale game with his friends; they’re admittedly not very good and mostly use the time to catch up over voice chat, unsure when they’ll next be able to see each other somewhere that’s not a steampunk-inflected virtual battlefield. And sometimes it is my turn to curl up on the couch with the cat and the person who has chosen to ride out this teleological nightmare of a time with me, and fight my way through yet another mind palace.
It is not a big deal, my boyfriend has assured me, to speed up the timing of our plans; that is a concept I’m still getting used to.
Alanna Okun is a deputy editor at The Goods as well as the author of The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater (2018) and Knit a Hat (2020).
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Winter will suck. We gathered some of Vox’s coziest minds to help you make it suck less.
A friend of mine, likely not meaning to sound so withering, once turned to me unprompted and said, “Alanna … you really have a lot of hobbies.”
She wasn’t wrong, even if her delivery made me sound at best like a twee little forest nymph wearing a crown made of acorns, and at worst like a dilettante cavorting from activity to activity. I do have an at times alarming number of hobbies, mostly of the crafty variety. I’ve been knitting for almost 25 years and have taught it to students of all ages for the past dozen or so (I’ve also written two books about it); I crochet, embroider, do a little bit of weaving and needle-felting, and have dabbled with clay, jewelry-making, and, for a departure that might just make me sound even more like Matilda’s Miss Honey, sing in a choir.
You might think this makes me well-suited for quarantine during the pandemic; I assure you it does not. I’ve been barely inclined to pick up a ball of yarn since March. Still, in the rare moments when I have felt motivated to make something, it’s had a demonstrable effect on my mental health, or at least on nudging along the inexorable passage of time in a way that does not include my cellphone.
This general set of benefits has not gone unnoticed by the people in my life — anecdotally, I’ve never had more people ask me to teach them how to knit than I did between late March and early May of this year, when it became clear that Covid-19 was not going away after a few weeks of sheltering in place.
As those of us who inexplicably chose to live somewhere with winter staring down its icy barrel, those requests have picked back up, maybe with a slightly more desperate tinge. Everyone, it seems, wants to get a hobby.
Knitting, for all that I love it, isn’t necessarily for everyone. The learning curve can be steep and, for some folks, it can require too much concentration to be truly soothing. With that in mind, here’s how to figure out which craft might be right for you, and how to get started without abandoning it in frustration.
The first thing to know when picking up a new hobby is that you will almost certainly be bad at it, and that is okay. In fact, it’s one of my favorite aspects of making stuff — the permission to fail repeatedly in a wildly low-stakes environment. It’s also one of my favorite parts of teaching children. Obviously, young people are as variable and multifaceted as adults, but I’ve found that the former have a far more comfortable relationship with not instantly being experts at a new task, while the latter are more inclined to give up the minute it becomes clear that they will not immediately become Etsy moguls.
That’s another side of crafting that I personally find, perhaps paradoxically, valuable: how separate it is from my actual work, and how it makes me feel productive without that productivity being tied to the pursuit of money. Of course, plenty of people make their living in part or wholly by selling what they make, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with picking up a craft with the hope that you might be able to sell your finished products. Especially at the beginning stages, though, I’d advise against focusing on that as your end goal, and instead concentrate on turning off your anxious brain, deciding which skills you’d like to get the hang of, or thinking about who you might like to give the first (or, let’s be real, third) fruit of your labors to. No shame whatsoever if that recipient is yourself.
So how do you choose which craft is right for you? There’s no such thing as a “crafty person” versus a non-crafty one, IMO, but your mileage may vary in terms of how much time, attention, and money you’re willing or able to invest. This goes triple during, say, a pandemic, when it should be considered a rousing victory simply to get through the day.
The crafts I tend to recommend to beginners range from deceptively simple (like embroidery and beading) to a somewhat steeper learning curve (knitting), and there are plenty of ways to go about procuring the materials and the resources you’ll need to learn for each. You can even get a sense of how difficult they’ll be before you decide to dive in yourself.
Some general rules of thumb: Your first and best friend in this regard will be the internet; basically every new craft I’ve ever taught myself was thanks to YouTube, or at least to the Instagram accounts, forum posts, and tutorials of people I found online. There are also plenty of paid classes, like the ones you can find on Craftsy, which cover everything from crochet to cake decorating. Whether you’re going the paid or free route, give yourself room to dig around and see what you come up with, and whose teaching and aesthetic styles you vibe with.
There are also plenty of preassembled kits that are perfect for when you don’t want to have to amass all the necessary materials for a given craft yourself; these tend to be pricier than acquiring supplies yourself, however (for example, a beginner knitting kit could easily run you $60, while buying similar materials a la carte can clock in at around half that), and you may find that written directions aren’t enough for your particular learning style. That said, kits are often easy, of high quality, and can make excellent gifts for the aspiring crafter in your life.
If cost is a barrier, or even if it’s not, I’m a big fan of letting whatever materials you already have on hand be your guide. If you have a forgotten stash of neon Sculpey clay or an inherited box of yarn, now’s a great time to figure out how to use them. Odds are, too, that someone in your orbit — a friend, a neighbor, a member of a religious or community group — has random supplies to give away as well. Keep an eye on your local Buy Nothing page to see if anyone is willing to facilitate a safe and distanced pickup.
There are, by my highly journalistic count, ten bajillion possible crafts you could pick up at this very moment, and likely ten quadrillion more that would require heavy machinery and/or a complete lifestyle overhaul. I’m going to focus on the ones I have some facility with and that can easily be done in the smallest of apartments and remotest of areas: embroidery, air-dry clay, and knitting. That’s roughly the order of difficulty as well. Again, this is a deeply non-exhaustive list of resources and materials, so feel beyond free to use whatever you have, can find, are drawn to, matches your current energy level, whatever. The world is your fibrous oyster.
Embroidery can comprise a bunch of different crafts, like needlepoint and cross-stitch, which often require patterns and gridded fabric and particular stitches; here, I mean “using thread on fabric to create images,” which is far more straightforward than it might at first appear.
If you’ve ever sewn a button back onto a shirt, you know all you need to get started. Still, I recommend this YouTube video as a jumping-off point, which is quite clear and has a jazzy little soundtrack as a bonus. Your first project should likely be a simple image or phrase meant to be displayed in a hoop, rather than immediately jumping to embroidering a denim jacket or a pillow, but your life, your rules.
For materials, you’ll want to get:
If you’re interested in a kit, check out these ones by ChloeArtCrafts on Etsy, which have rave reviews and feature cute, modern images.
Chances are, you follow an impossibly cool girl on Instagram who perpetually posts time-lapses of herself at a pottery wheel and always seems to be running to and from the kiln with beautifully glazed pots and mugs. Unfortunately, you likely do not have a pottery wheel nor a kiln in your house, so you cannot easily become that girl during a pandemic. That’s where air-dry clay comes in. The name is pretty self-evident, but it doesn’t require heat to become firm nor for paint to set, and there are some really decent versions available for very little money. This is an especially great activity to do with kids, although be careful when it comes to any surfaces or fabrics you might be crafting around; acrylic paint can be an absolute nightmare to wash out.
This requires less of a hard-and-fast materials list or tutorial because a lot of it is just playing around and seeing what you enjoy, but it can be somewhat annoying when you’re first figuring out how the clay itself works. Here’s a solid YouTube tutorial that goes over how to make an imprinted jewelry dish, and shows the importance of keeping the clay damp but not too wet as well as what to do if you start to see cracks.
The only thing you REALLY need here is the clay itself and a cup of water for moistening it, but if you want to shape or paint your project with any facility, there are some other materials to keep an eye out for:
For the kit-seekers, I’ve heard good things about a company called Sculpd, which provides everything you’ll need to get started and has some very chic paint colors to boot.
I hope I didn’t scare you off of knitting altogether, because it’s really The Thing that’s anchored me and brought me comfort in the roughest of times. I wrote an intro knitting book this year that focuses on how to knit a hat even as an absolute beginner; it’s my personal philosophy that so many adults have sour memories of learning to knit because they actually just hated knitting scarves, so repetitive and interminable and which nobody really wants in the first place.
If you’re not looking to make a hat just yet nor give your money to a stranger on the internet (fair!), here is a series of videos by KnittingHelp that I often point newbies toward. It’s as relaxing as a bathtub and half a Xanax and will help you get started with the basic building blocks of the craft. I also highly recommend getting an account on Ravelry, which is a free social media site slash pattern resource and where I’ve found virtually all of the resources and inspiration in my own knitting life.
Your materials will vary depending on what you’d like to knit first. Here are some fairly universal options:
KnitPicks, a lovely and very affordable yarn retailer, has a line of beginner kits if you’d prefer to go that route. And here’s some more info in an article I wrote a few years back about how to get started; it doesn’t totally hold up mid-pandemic because you likely won’t be visiting a yarn store and rubbing skeins against your neck any time soon, yet it hopefully provides some useful additional context.
Above all, I implore you not to give up right away, particularly when it comes to knitting but really in whatever craft you choose; if you truly hate it, you can always find another, and you might surprise yourself by pushing through. We’re going to be stuck inside for a while — we might as well make something.
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Part of the Romance Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.
Alanna Okun is a deputy editor at Vox. She is the author of The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater and the forthcoming Knit a Hat.
Aude White is a graphic artist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Believer, and more.
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